Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV MARKETING FUNCTIONS AND FUNCTIONARIES Direct sale from original producer to final consumer as distinct from sale through a commercial mechanism has previously been shown to exist still as an important feature of commerce. This type of sale has been made increasingly difficult and less satisfactory, however, by nearly all of the characteristic modern conditions of production and consumption. The elaboration of demand, in itself, constitutes a serious handicap on direct sale. For example, in the case of fresh foods, when demand is dependent entirely on the existence of a near-by supply of fresh foods, no commercial mechanism of any consequence is necessary. But when, by virtue of expanded transportation facilities, it becomes possible to offer fresh foods from a distance both before and after those locally produced are available, it is difficult to see how direct sale can be expected to handle all the business effectively. Similarly, on the side of production, the development of large-scale operation has lessened the effectiveness of direct sale and increased the dependence on some form of commercial mechanism. More often than not, the volume of production which can be carried on most effectively in any given factory or other production unit is larger than can be sold economically by direct methods. Moreover, the minimizing of the restrictionson the sale of a product formerly imposed by distance, due to the reduction in both relative and actual costs of transportation, has made the complete localization of markets for large-scale producing units as difficult as it is undesirable. The fact that a manufacturer of shirts in St. Louis can sell his product in Pittsburgh almost as cheaply as he can in St. Louis, and also as cheaply as a Pittsburgh manufacturer can sell...